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Opinion Column

Michael Bloomberg's soda folly

The city’s lawyers argued in court that the Board of Health could hand down the new soda rule because it has broad powers to fight disease. But there is a difference between an outbreak of a deadly communicable disease that has people dropping in the streets and excessive soda consumption. If someone drinks a 32-ounce Cherry Coke next to you at a movie theater, it doesn’t make you sick.

In his decision striking down the ban — which the city is appealing — Judge Milton Tingling mentioned that, in the 19th century, the Board of Health was given the power to put contagious patients out to sea in floating hospitals. If a health expert from some university somewhere suggested floating obese people out to sea as a weight-loss measure, Bloomberg might be sorely tempted.

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A mere partial ban on large serving sizes is unlikely to have any effect, though. In a piece for The Daily Beast, Trevor Butterworth noted that soda-drinking is not spread evenly throughout the population. He cited a study of how much soda teenagers drink. For most of them, it wasn’t an inordinate amount. But the top-consuming 20 percent of adolescent boys drank an ungodly 193.6 ounces, or more than a gallon, a day. Does Bloomberg think anything he does short of an outright ban on all soda will stop these kids from finding a way to get their sugary drinks? In that event, they would undoubtedly visit Mountain Dew speak-easies and imbibe home-brewed Dr Pepper.

Even if the mayor were to succeed in reducing the calories people get through soda, they could always get them another way. In a study called “From Coke to Coors,” Cornell University researchers conducted an experiment “in a small American city where half of the households faced a 10 percent [soda] tax and half did not. The 10 percent tax resulted in a short-term (one-month) decrease in soft drink purchases, but there was no decrease in purchases over a three-month or six-month period. Moreover, in beer-purchasing households, this tax led to increased purchases of beer.”

The New York Times reported that the mayor’s office is particularly anxious over the fate of the soda ban because the mayor is more and more concerned over his legacy. He shouldn’t worry. His reputation as the nation’s foremost highhanded scold is already well-established.